@McTag,
Montgomery was perfectly prepared to the fight . . . the First World War. He had all these silly ideas about phase lines, and coordinated avances, and he would actually hold up units which had shown initiative and were effecting breakthroughs so that everyone could get to the phase line before advancing again. That was disaster for the New Zealanders at el Alamein, who had suffered terribly in the advance, but then broke into the German defensive position, scattering them. But no effort was made to exploit this breakthrough, and the Kiwis were held up waiting for everyone else to reach the "phase line." The Germans, of course, had registered their own positions with their artillery, and just pasted the Kiwis as they waited for everyone else to reach the phase line and continue the advance. Rommel was able to extricate an army which he had thought was doomed. Rommel had no great respect for Montgomery, either.
The worst of Montgomery's crimes, though, was his conduct of the counter-offensive to the "battle of the bulge." Patton had offered, more than once, to take three divisions, break through the German line at the German border, and attempt to bag the whole lot. Even if he could not have bagged them, they'd have been forced into a headlong retreat in bad weather on bad roads. But Montgomery threw one of his hissy fits, and pissed and moaned and pouted until Ike gave him command of the counter-offensive. He hit the Germans head on, and pulled this phase line bullshit. American paratroop units were veteran, and accustomed to fighting behind enemy lines, without direct communications. Time and again American PIRs (parachute infantry regiment) would take their objective, and continue to hit the Germans hard while they still reeling. This messed up Monty's pretty lines on the maps, and when he actually ordered American PIRs to withdraw to their phase lines, Matthew Ridgeway, the senior American paratroop commander, refused to serve under him any longer, and begged Ike to let him pull out the PIRs--but Ike would not agree to that.
That winter of 1944-45 was just about the worst winter in living memory, and everyone involved suffered horribly. But worst of all, the Americans and the English suffered vast unnecessary casualties as Monty hit the Germans head on again, and again, and again. He employed no subtlety, and his insistence on his idiotic phase lines resulted in thousands of futile casualties, many of them frost-bite or men actually freezing to death in the lines. This is a little known episode in the war, and that's because everyone could see how bad it was at the time, and so it has not been much discussed in the histories.
It might have happened again, too, with Monty insisting that his "bounce the Rhine" plan should have absolute priority. One of Courtney Hodges First Army divisions managed to take the Rhine bridge at Remagen, and Ike sure as hell wasn't going to order them to recross the Rhine just to feed Monty's vanity. But he did let Montgomery play his silly little games, and as usual, that meant that Monty got nearly everything he wanted, including American troops, and even an airborne division (but not any of Matthew Ridgeway's divisions). It was a typical Montgomery slaughter, since the Germans had figured out weeks before the attack that it was coming, and shot hell out of the paratroops as they came down, and the assault boats as they crossed the river.
No, i don't entertain a high opinion of Monty's military credentials.
